Short essays about novels and other fictional works

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Many famous authors known mostly for their novels also penned a number of short stories.

They may have started their writing careers with brief fiction, and may have continued to compose stories after turning to novels. They wrote stories for the money, to try different genres, to explore themes they felt wouldn’t work as well in the longer novel format, to take a “breather” from novels, etc.

All this came to mind last week while reading a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories. Fitzgerald is of course best known for his small canon of novels — The Great Gatsby obviously being the most famous — but he also sold about 160 pieces of short fiction to magazines during his 44-year life. Fitzgerald even used some of his stories — such as the compelling “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” about a “baby” born old who grows younger — to delve into fantasy or supernatural themes almost entirely absent from his novels.

Fitzgerald’s stories include those, such as the poignant “Babylon Revisited” and the barbed “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” with themes (spoiled/rich characters, troubled relationships, social competition, lots of drinking, etc.) reminiscent of his long fiction. Then there’s the eye-opening “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” about the world’s wealthiest family trying to keep their existence secret in a remote area of Montana. It’s a creepy/fascinating/memorable tale, unfortunately lessened by blatant racism that can’t be excused by Fitzgerald’s somewhat-satiric approach.

Leo Tolstoy, author of the classic novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, also wrote some amazing short fiction — some of it just long enough to edge into novella territory. The snowy “Master and Man,” the melancholy “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” the dramatic “The Kreutzer Sonata,” the history-tinged “Hadji Murat,” etc.

Herman Melville’s main claim to fame is the iconic Moby-Dick and other novels, but he also penned memorable/wide-ranging short fiction — including the slavery saga “Benito Cereno,” the sublimely disturbing office tale “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and the droll “I and My Chimney.”

In addition to writing terrific novels such as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton penned some very absorbing short stories that included a number of excellent ghost tales.

Prominent living novelists who have successfully gone down the short-story road include Isabel Allende, Margaret Atwood, Lee Child, Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Alice Walker, to name just a few. Lahiri hit the Pulitzer Prize jackpot with her Interpreter of Maladies story collection, which preceded her novels The Namesake and The Lowland. I love Kingsolver’s Homeland and Other Stories and Atwood’s Wilderness Tips collection. And the title tale of Atwood’s Stone Mattress collection is a gripping piece of fiction.

There are novels with happy endings, which most readers love if the happiness doesn’t feel forced. Then there are novels with sad endings, which readers tolerate if those conclusions seem appropriate. And there are novels with endings somewhere in between — the subject of this blog post.

I kind of like ambiguous endings. Life is often like that, and those conclusions make you think — wondering about the fate of characters beyond a book’s last pages.

Of course, novels in a series often have non-closure endings — cliffhangers perhaps — to increase your desire to read the next book installment. But there are also stand-alone novels with far-from-definitive conclusions.

Take Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, which I also discussed last week in a different context. While that novel has a mostly shipboard setting, there’s a relationship subplot between U.S. Navy guy Willie Keith and modestly successful nightclub singer May Wynn (born Marie Minotti). May grows to love Willie, and he’s enamored with her, but the Ivy League-educated/from-an-affluent-family Willie is snobbishly uncomfortable with May’s working-class origins, Italian-American ethnicity, and Catholicism. He eventually breaks up with May and then, after a near-death military experience on his boat, realizes how compatible they are. But May is in another relationship back home in New York City, and perhaps still not totally trusting of Willie’s feelings, so the book ends unresolved about whether they’ll have a future together. I was satisfied with that finish.

Another novel that interestingly dashes closure expectations is Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, in which a boy’s murder radically affects the lives of his surviving family — most notably his sister Harriet. Readers assume that Robin’s mystery death will be solved at the end, but it never is. I found that intriguing, and realistic in its way.

Then there’s John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which has a poignantly beautiful conclusion — yet it’s uncertain what will happen to the remnants of the Joad family as they try to survive broke, homeless, and weather-beaten in the 1930s California they had traveled to with high hopes.

Set just a few years after Steinbeck’s American masterpiece, Erich Maria Remarque’s Arch of Triumph features surgeon Ravic — who has fled the Nazis for Paris, where he ekes out a living, falls in love, and seeks revenge against a Gestapo man. As the heartbreaking novel concludes, it looks like Ravic might end up a German prisoner. Will he survive World War II? A reader has no idea.

The ending of Zadie Smith’s scintillating novel White Teeth is deliberately confusing and uncertain, with various scenarios posited for the future lives of its majority-immigrant cast. (Ms. Smith is pictured atop this blog post.)

Then there are novels with endings that are kind of ambiguous, but one figures things out on a closer reading or rereading. That’s the case with Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, in which one is initially uncertain if Civil War soldier Inman dies or doesn’t die after his long, arduous journey to return to Ada.

Short stories can of course also have non-definitive endings. A prime example is Frank Stockton’s much-anthologized 1882 tale “The Lady or the Tiger?” — in which the on-trial lover of a king’s daughter has to choose between two doors: one with a ferocious tiger behind it and the other with a woman (not the king’s daughter) he would have to marry. He reaches for the door the (jealous?) daughter imperceptibly tells him to open, and the story ends there.

I’ll finish with a mention of the famous final scene from The Sopranos TV series in which the screen cuts to black as we wonder what happened or didn’t happen at the restaurant that Tony S. and other characters were in. (That restaurant — Holsten’s in Bloomfield, New Jersey — happens to be about a mile from my apartment in nearby Montclair.)

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — about my town’s African-American population unfortunately decreasing — is here.

Last week, I wrote about famous writers who died young. This week — you guessed it! — I’ll discuss famous writers who lived into old age, 85 or more.

The only way to start this is by mentioning Herman Wouk, who’s still alive at…103! He’s the author of modern classics such as The Caine Mutiny, Marjorie Morningstar, The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance; I need to read at least one of them! And To Sir, With Love novelist E.R. Braithwaite was 104 when he died two years ago.

Many writers who lived many decades did their best work in their 20s and 30s, many others peaked in mid-career, and some finally put it all together only when approaching senior-citizen status. For those in the latter two groups, we’d never have gotten to enjoy their A+ efforts if they had died young.

For instance, the now-94-year-old Rosamunde Pilcher wrote 22 novels before The Shell Seekers — her masterpiece — came out when she was 63. Maybe the author had to be that age to depict 60-something protagonist Penelope Keeling so convincingly and wonderfully? Pilcher went on to pen five more novels before retiring in 2000.

The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, a novel I read this month, was written by Dorothy Gilman in her 40s — so she’s an example of an author who peaked mid-career, decades before dying at age 88. The book, which stars a widowed New Jersey homemaker in her 60s who becomes a CIA operative, is both hilarious and action-packed — a tough combination to pull off. (A scene from a screen version is pictured above.)

A prime example of a long-lived author who peaked early is of course Harper Lee, who was in her mid-30s when To Kill a Mockingbird rocketed to fame; she died at 89. Upton Sinclair was still in his 20s when The Jungle was published — though, unlike Lee, he wrote dozens of subsequent (albeit lesser-known) novels into his 80s. He passed away at 90.

Other authors who were with us for many decades? Renowned mystery writers P.D. James and Agatha Christie lived to 94 and 85, respectively, while sci-fi greats Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. Le Guin died at 91 and 88. (Yes, I know those authors sometimes worked outside the genres I mentioned; Le Guin, for instance, was also known for her fantasy fiction.) Comedic writer P.G. Wodehouse, creator of the iconic Jeeves, lasted until 93.

Among literature’s “writers for the ages” are many who died at a young or relatively young age. They packed memorable works into their short time on Earth — in some cases, just one or several works; in other cases, quite a few. Pretty impressive.

It’s poignant to think of what else they might have produced if they hadn’t died well before their senior-citizen days because of suicide, disease, alcoholism, hard living, an accident, etc. Some might have never surpassed the “A” quality of their early output, but even “B” work would have been welcome.

In this post, I’m going to focus on writers who never reached the age of 45.

The first I’ll mention is died-at-44 Joseph Roth (1894-1939), an Austrian writer who’s not that well known today but should be. This month I read his novel Right and Left, and was impressed. Not his best or most-remembered work — that’s probably The Radetzky March, which I haven’t read — but Right and Left is a fascinating look at several not particularly appealing characters living in 1920s Germany, just a few years before the Nazis rose to power. Roth conveys what it’s like for Jewish or part-Jewish people to live at that time and place, and we see plenty of politics, wealth, poverty, unhappy relationships, self-hatred, shallowness, melancholy, and more.

Also 44 when they died were four much more famous writers: Anton Chekhov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Louis Stevenson, and D.H. Lawrence.

Chekhov is of course known for his terrific, subtle short stories as well as his plays. Fitzgerald is obviously most associated with his great The Great Gatsby, but one can also find a lot to like in his novels Tender Is the Night and (the unfinished) The Last Tycoon. This Side of Paradise? Meh. I plan to eventually read Fitzgerald’s short stories.

The novels Stevenson is most remembered for include Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — but, as I’ve written before, I think his last book was his best: the exquisite Weir of Hermiston, unfortunately also not completed. Lawrence made his mark with novels such as Sons and Lovers and Women in Love.

I’ll take a brief break here from writers known mostly for novels or short stories to mention some known mainly for poetry during their short lives: Countee Cullen (who lived to 42), Arthur Rimbaud (37), Lord Byron (36), Phillis Wheatley (31), Percy Bysshe Shelley (29), and John Keats (25). In the theatrical realm, we have A Raisin in the Sun playwright Lorraine Hansberry (34).

Nikolai Gogol, who lived to 42, was a playwright, novelist (Dead Souls), and more. Guy de Maupassant, also 42, made his name with short stories and some novels. Jane Austen of course wrote six now-classic novels (including Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion) before dying at 41. Jack London churned out a large number of works in his 40 short years on Earth, with my four favorite novels of his The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea-Wolf, and Martin Eden. Edgar Allan Poe produced many works of horror and some non-horror before dying at age 40. And Franz Kafka (40), is perhaps best known for his surreal novella The Metamorphosis.

There are also Flannery O’Connor (39), most famous for her story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and her novel Wise Blood; Alexander Pushkin (37), the Russian poet, playwright, and novelist; Nathanael West (37) of The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts renown; John Kennedy Toole (31), whose Pulitzer Prize-winning A Confederacy of Dunces was published posthumously through the efforts of his mother and author Walker Percy; Sylvia Plath (30), who wrote The Bell Jar and more; and Stephen Crane (28), who penned The Red Badge of Courage and more.

Before concluding, I obviously also have to mention the Brontë sisters: Charlotte, 38; Emily, 30; and Anne, 29 (all pictured in the painting atop this blog post). Charlotte lived long enough to pen several novels, including the iconic Jane Eyre. Emily’s one novel was of course the tempestuous Wuthering Heights, and the best of Anne’s two novels was The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. There was more than a little Brontë poetry, too.

Who are some of your favorite writers (ones I mentioned or didn’t) who died young or relatively young? You can go a few years over 45 if you’d like (as did George Orwell, O. Henry, Henry Fielding, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Margaret Mitchell, Edward Bellamy, Carson McCullers, Stieg Larsson, Honoré de Balzac, William Shakespeare, Richard Wright, Mary Shelley, Kate Chopin, Emily Dickinson, James Hilton, etc.)!

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — about a heartwarming fundraiser and not-heartwarming overdevelopment — is here.

After reading last week that Margaret Atwood is writing a follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, I thought about which sequels — and series — spanned the most time.

Atwood’s famous, feminist, dystopian novel came out in 1985, and The Testaments will be published in 2019 — making for a gap of 34 years. Not quite the 36-year-period between Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) and its sequel Doctor Sleep (2013), but plenty long.

Why gaps like that? Authors such as King and Atwood (pictured above) are of course busy writing many other books, and may not want to revisit the same characters — at least until several decades go by. In Atwood’s case, one spur for the coming sequel is the high popularity of the current The Handmaid’s Tale television series. Also, the Republican Party’s current far-right/misogynist politics make her 1985 novel prescient and very relevant to today.

The Testaments will reportedly begin 15 years after The Handmaid’s Tale ends. Other sequels can of course be set closer or farther away in time from the original novel.

Can many-years-later sequels be better? Sometimes. Heck, the authors have often become more mature writers. But they might also be past their prime, a bit tired, and not have as many new ideas. Still, numerous fans don’t mind if a sequel isn’t as good; they’re just happy it exists. Plus there’s money to be made for the authors — not that superstar writers like Atwood and King need it. 🙂

Other one-sequel, multiple-sequel, or series scenarios spanning many a decade?

P.G. Wodehouse wrote his Jeeves novels and stories over a stunning period of nearly 60 years — 1915 to 1974!

Agatha Christie featured Hercule Poirot in 40-plus novels and short-story collections for more than a half-century — from 1920’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles into the 1970s. And Christie’s Miss Marple character starred in more than 10 books from 1930 (The Murder at the Vicarage) into the ’70s.

John Updike’s four Rabbit novels were published over a period of 30 years (1960, 1971, 1981, 1990) — with a novella added to the mix in 2001. So, 41 years total.

Other large spans include 35 years between Sue Grafton’s first and 25th “alphabet mysteries” starring Kinsey Millhone (“A” Is for Alibi, 1982/“Y” Is for Yesterday, 2017); 32 years between Martin Cruz Smith’s first and eighth Arkady Renko novels (Gorky Park, 1981/Tatiana, 2013); 26 years between Walter Mosley’s first and 14th Easy Rawlins novels (Devil in a Blue Dress, 1990/Charcoal Joe, 2016); 25 years between Jack Finney’s Time and Again (1970) and From Time to Time (1995); 24 years between Janet Evanovich’s first and 25th Stephanie Plum novels (One for the Money, 1994/Look Alive Twenty-Five, 2018); and 23 years between Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool (1993) and Everybody’s Fool (2016).

Then there are Honore de Balzac’s and Emile Zola’s many-book sagas containing stand-alone but interlinked novels featuring characters who pop in and out, sometimes as lead protagonists and sometimes as supporting players. Balzac wrote his La Comedie Humaine works from 1830 to the late 1840s — not that long a period because of his relatively early death, but an extraordinarily prolific period that produced a whopping 90-plus novels (such as Old Goriot and Cousin Bette) and stories! Zola penned his 20 Rougon-Macquart novels (The Drinking Den, Germinal, etc.) from 1871 to 1893.

Other sequels and series you can name with many-year publishing spans? And/or any comments about the ones I mentioned?

I will not be posting columns on December 9 and 16 (because of another trip to Florida to deal with my late mother’s estate and some other reasons). Back on December 23! I’ll still reply to comments under already-published columns. 🙂

Sometimes the main or almost-main character in a novel or short story is an inanimate object. And sometimes that object can seem almost as alive as characters who are actually alive (albeit fictionally).

My latest object of (literary) desire is the painted drum in Louise Erdrich’s absorbing novel The Painted Drum, which I’m in the middle of reading. As is often the case with fiction’s noteworthy objects, the non-living thing is named in the title. And this Native-American artifact has a personality of sorts, crafted beauty, and a major impact on the plot. (Ms. Erdrich is pictured above.)

Other prominent objects in literature of course include houses, cars, art, jewelry, statues, and more.

When a house is the title “character,” there’s frequently something about it that makes the human protagonists uneasy. For instance, Jane Austen’s part-spoof-of-Gothic-fiction Northanger Abbey features a character (Catherine Morland) whose overactive imagination gets a bit out of hand when she visits the titular dwelling. The house in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is legitimately scary, the one in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables is not exactly a happy place, and the abode in Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand is the jumping-off point for some weird time travel.

More positive is the house in L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle. It’s not literally a blue castle, but it’s the dream home Valancy Stirling has always wished for but never thought she’d have — and Valancy ends up living there with a man she loves through a very improbable set of circumstances.

Speaking of time travel a la du Maurier, there’s also H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine — with that titular device a vehicle of sorts.

Cars? The automobile “character” I first thought of is the one in Stephen King’s From a Buick 8 that’s a portal to a spooky place.

Art? Donna Tartt’s set-in-recent-times novel The Goldfinch is built around Carel Fabritius’ 1654 painting “The Goldfinch,” which is taken from a museum by protagonist Theo Decker amid the chaos of a terrorist attack that kills his mother and others. The priceless painting subsequently has a giant effect on Theo’s life.

Jewelry, gems, and such? Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone — an early novel in the detective genre — “stars” a huge diamond. The also-huge, very valuable pearl in John Steinbeck’s novella The Pearl is not the positive find Kino and his family hope it will be; it turns out to be a disaster — as does the article of jewelry in Guy de Maupassant’s devastating short story “The Necklace.”

Then there’s of course J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, in which the trilogy’s most-powerful ring is as consequential (to the plot and the future of Middle-earth) as it gets.

Statues? There’s the stone pillar in Erich Maria Remarque’s The Black Obelisk that can be seen as a symbol of the nascent Nazi movement in 1920s Germany. And there’s the famous statuette that’s the title of Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon, starring detective Sam Spade.

Another sleuthing work focusing on an object is Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter,” featuring detective C. Auguste Dupin. Poe also put inanimate things in the titles of several other tales — including “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Oblong Box,” and “The Oval Portrait,” among others.

Oh, and there are the fateful overpasses in The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder and Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather.

The ever-popular category of crime fiction — which can include detective novels, mysteries, thrillers, etc. — has different categories of authors.

There are those writers — such as Raymond Chandler, Lee Child, Agatha Christie, Michael Connelly, Arthur Conan Doyle, Janet Evanovich, Sue Grafton, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, P.D. James, Walter Mosley, Louise Penny, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Lisa Scottoline — known mostly for their crime fiction, even as they occasionally roam/roamed outside that genre. Then there are authors known more for their non-crime-fiction work, even as they produce/produced some strong offerings in the detective/mystery/thriller realm. This blog post will be about the latter group — which includes people like Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, J.K. Rowling, and Mark Twain.

I’ll first discuss Rowling, who, as “Robert Galbraith,” writes the series starring fascinating private investigator Cormoran Strike. I read the debut installment, The Cuckoo’s Calling, this week — and was bowled over by how smoothly Rowling moved into crime fiction after conquering the young-adult/magical-fiction world with her iconic Harry Potter series and then writing the compelling general-adult-fiction book The Casual Vacancy. Rowling will always be associated more with Harry Potter than anything else, but her versatility is off-the-charts.

Collins is best known for The Woman in White, an ultra-suspenseful mystery; and The Moonstone, an early example of detective fiction. But most of his novels were in the realm of general fiction.

Poe is of course almost synonymous with horror fiction, but he wrote several earlier-than-The Moonstone detective stories starring C. Auguste Dupin — the most famous of which were “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter.”

Twain’s late-career novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, with its important plot-solving element of fingerprint analysis, placed that author somewhat in the crime-solving genre. Two years later, Twain came out with Tom Sawyer, Detective — one of his lesser novels.

Dickens turned to the mystery genre with his last, unfinished book — The Mystery of Edwin Drood — after more than 30 years of penning more general literary works.

Obviously, authors who write crime fiction most of the time can really master that genre, but the potential drawback can be a certain sameness in some of their work. Those pros and cons can of course flip for writers who turn to crime fiction only occasionally.

Any thoughts on the two categories of crime-fiction authors discussed in this blog post? Your favorite works in each category?

(BTW, one reason Jim Grant took the name Lee Child was because that alias alphabetically placed his Jack Reacher novels in libraries and bookstores between the works of crime-fiction greats Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie — just like Child ended up between Chandler and Christie in this blog post’s second paragraph.)